Grilled Lettuce Meatballs (Variation 1)

Grilled. Lettuce. Meatballs.

I have some garden boxes in my front yard, and despite the best efforts of April to kill off my first seedlings (snow halfway through April? for reals?) they are now flourishing, to the extent where I have to have a good excuse NOT to eat salad for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That was why I was so excited to see Brooklyn Farm Girl's Baked Lettuce Soy Sauce Meatballs.

Look at this! Isn't it pretty? It's an old bookcase full of lettuce!

The other thing I've been trying to figure out how to do more of: grilling vegetables. Meat's expensive, after all, and grilling, in addition to being delicious, doesn't heat up the kitchen. Turns out that if you put the heat on medium-low on the grill and put the top down, you can bake stuff in it just like an oven. It may be a bit more imprecise (well, for sure it's more imprecise with me; if you're the committed type you could maybe figure something out, I don't know) but that works just fine for a recipe like this.

The harvest from the box above

I really like these. The lettuce is both delicate and earthy, so these taste more complex than just a regular ball-o-ground-meat. You can, I suppose, treat them like other meatballs and put them in sandwiches or sauces, but if you put out a plateful of them at, say, a barbecue, I don't think you'll ever get that far!

Ingredients

Don't be afraid to squeeze the lettuce to bunch it for chopping.
You're going to be sauteeing it anyway.

• 1 lb ground meat (I used ground beef; you can try ground turkey, add in some ground pork, why not, if you can get it from a decent/affordable source)
• 1 cup breadcrumbs (this is a great way to use up stale bread, heels of bread, buns that you toasted but that nobody ate, that sort of thing. This is not a recipe worth buying breadcrumbs for.)
• 2 eggs
• 1 Whole Mess of Lettuce (I guess about 3 cups? 1 head? 1 garden box worth?)
• Splash of oil
• Splash of soy sauce
• 3 cloves garlic (or, you know, more. Garlic's good.)
• Seasonings (I used oregano, thyme, and adobo powder. Mess around. )

Instructions

Chop it up about this much.

Wash your lettuce and chop it nice and fine. I chop it crossways.

You'll lose a lot of volume here.

Heat up the oil in a large skillet, saute your garlic a bit, and then add the lettuce. That's right, you're sauteeing the lettuce like it was a bitter green. WHAT. I know, why didn't you think of that, right? It's all right, I didn't think of it either, but you bet I'm doing it now. It'll wilt up pretty fast, so keep stirring it around and don't let it burn. Add the soy sauce - a couple tablespoons or so. Turn off the heat.

It's about 1:1:1 bread:meat:lettuce by volume.

Get a bowl and mix together the remaining ingredients: meat, breadcrumbs, seasonings, eggs. Add your mess of lettuce. You can mix this together by hand or you can stick it in a food processor. I've tried both ways and they both work fine; it depends on the sort of texture you like in your end product.

Form the mixture into golf ball sized meatballs and stick them on a greased cookie sheet. You can put em right up next to each other. They're not cookies; they'll shrink rather than expand.

Ready for the grill

Cook in a 350 oven or a medium-low grill for 30-45 minutes or until cooked through.

Cost:

• Meat: $3.50
• Breadcrumbs: Marginal; come on. If you don't have leftover bread, wait till you do to make these.
• Eggs: $.50
• Lettuce: Free from the garden! Or about $1 worth, I guess.

Serves: However many people 18 meatballs serves. What else are they eating?